Your Casual Acquaintances on Twitter Are Better Than Your Close Friends on Facebook

Photo: Alex Washburn / WIRED

Excerpt adapted from Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better, copyright (c) Clive Thompson, 2013. Reprinted by arrangement with The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company.

Aftermy second child was born and our family had outgrown our apartment, we decided to try to buy a house in Brooklyn, New York. We’d been at it for many months, not finding anything that worked. Then one day during the hunt, my wife, Emily, wound up in the subway station at the southern end of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. She looked at her phone and noticed that there was a WiFi signal inside the station, deep underground. So she posted a status update on Facebook: “There’s WiFi in the 15th Street subway stop. Who knew?” As was typical, a few of Emily’s close friends commented in reply.

She was aware of their status only on Facebook, in that sort of jumbly, promiscuous oh-hi-there-let’s-stay-in-touch way.

But then something fortunate happened. A woman named Anne also noticed the status update. Now, Anne wasn’t a close friend of Emily’s; in fact, Emily hadn’t seen her in years — she was married to Brad, a man Emily had met fifteen years previously when they’d both lived in Atlanta. Emily was aware of their status only on Facebook, in that sort of jumbly, promiscuous oh-hi-there-let’s-stay-in-touch way.

Anne happened to glance at the subway comment and asked, in the thread, “What are you doing in that neighborhood?” Emily explained that we were looking to buy a house. Then Anne pointed out that hey, coincidentally, she had some friends who were just about to put their house on the market in that area. Next week, in fact! Quickly the dominoes began to topple. Anne put us in contact with the owners. We discovered that the house was precisely what we wanted. And because we’d heard about it through word of mouth, we were able to put in an early bid. A few months later, we moved in.

This entire stroke of luck hinged upon what sociologists call a weak tie. In a pre-social-network world, there’s almost zero chance that Emily would have been in regular contact with the wife of a friend from years ago. One’s social circles rarely include that sort of distant connection. It’s even less likely that a distant link would be exposed to your stray observations, like “Wow, there’s WiFi in this subway station.”

Jobs that people heard about via personal contacts were best of all. But when people got these word-of-mouth jobs, they most often came via a weak tie.

In a world of status updates, tangential, seemingly minor ties become part of your social fabric. And they can bring in some extremely useful information.

In 1973, sociologist Mark Granovetter gave a name to this powerful process: “The Strength of Weak Ties.” Granovetter had spent time researching the ways in which people found new jobs. After surveying hundreds of job finders, he discovered there were three main strategies: responding to job advertisements; direct application and coldcalling; or harnessing personal contacts.

When Granovetter analyzed the data, two things leaped out. First, jobs that people heard about via personal contacts were best of all. These jobs were more likely to have high salaries than jobs found through formal means or direct application, and they were more likely to be fulfilling: more than 54 percent of the people who’d heard of their job through personal contacts were “very satisfied” with the new job, compared to 52.8 percent who’d used direct application and only 30 percent of those who’d used formal methods.

But the second finding was even more intriguing: When people got these word-of-mouth jobs, they most often came via a weak tie. Almost 28 percent of the people heard of their job from someone they saw once a year or less. Another 55.6 percent heard of their job from someone they saw “more than once a year but less than twice a week.” Only a minority were told of the job by a “strong tie,” someone whom they saw at least twice a week. To put it another way, you’re far less likely to hear about a great job opening from a close friend. You’re much more likely to learn about it from a distant colleague.

“It is remarkable,” Granovetter marveled, “that people receive crucial information from individuals whose very existence they have forgotten.”

Why would this be? Surely your close friends are the ones looking out for you, eager to help you find a good job? Sure, but as Granovetter pointed out, your friends have an informational deficit. They’re too similar.

This is the principle of homophily: Socially, we tend to be close friends with people who mirror us demographically, culturally, intellectually, politically, and professionally. This makes it easy to bond — but it also means that we drink from the same informational pool. Any jobs my close friends have heard about, I’ve heard about, too.

Our friends have an informational deficit. They’re too similar.

Weak ties are different. These people are, as Granovetter pointed out, further afield, so they’re soaking in information we don’t have and moving among people we don’t know at all. That’s why they’re the people most likely to broker juicy job offers. “Acquaintances, as compared to close friends, are more prone to move in different circles than one’s self,” Granovetter argued. The ties are weak, but they are rich conduits for information.

The only people who traffickedin tons of contacts back in Granoveter’s 1970s were what MalcolmGladwell called connectors, those rare, deeply social types whoknew far more people than the average. Those people were powerfulprecisely becauseof their octopus-like connections to so many weak ties. Theybrokered information that the rest of us were simply too lazy, busy,or constitutionally unsuited to leverage.

The ties are weak, but they are rich conduits for information.

Today’s ambient tools dissolve those limits. They make it far easier for us to keep tabs on weak ties and to make more of them. This phenomenon transforms everyday people into super-connectors, in everyday lightweight contact with far more people than before.

And while Google is useful at quickly answering a specific factual question, networks of people harness wisdom and judgment — not just pattern matching of facts. They are better at fuzzy, “any-idea-how-to-deal-with-this?” dilemmas that occupy everyday life.

Mind you, acquiring a network that feeds you surprising and valuable knowledge doesn’t happen on its own. Like most of our new digital tools, crafting a good set of weak links takes work. If we don’t engage in that sort of work, it has repercussions. It’s easier to lean into homophily, connecting online to people who are demographically similar: the same age, class, ethnicity and race, even the same profession.

Homophily is deeply embedded in our psychology, and as Eli Pariser adroitly points out in The Filter Bubble, digital tools can make homophily worse, narrowing our worldview.

For example, Facebook’s news feed analyzes which contacts you most pay attention to and highlights their updates in your “top stories” feed, so you’re liable to hear more and more often from the same small set of people. (Worse, as I’ve discovered, it seems to drop from view the people whom you almost never check in on — which means your weakest ties gradually vanish from sight.) As Pariser suggests, we can fight homophily with self-awareness — noticing our own built-in biases, cultivating contacts that broaden our world, and using tools that are less abstruse and covert than Facebook’s hidden algorithms.

If you escape homophily, there’s another danger to ambient awareness: It can become simply too interesting and engaging. A feed full of people broadcasting clever thoughts and intriguing things to read is, like those seventeenth-century coffee shops, a scene so alluring it’s impossible to tear yourself away. Like many others, I’ve blown hours doing nothing of value (to my bank account, anyway) while careening from one serendipitous encounter to another.

Others have complained that ambient awareness stokes their FOMO — “fear of missing out,” the persistent dread that there’s some hashtagged “happening” they’re missing out on rightthis instant, a sort of hipster recency paranoia on overdrive.

The trick here is mindfulness. We need to notice when our dallying in the ambient world is taking us away from other things we ought to be doing. Stowe Boyd, a pioneer in social media, once compared ambient signals to a stream of water. You go to a stream to take a sip — not to try to inhale the entire thing.

“You take a drink, and you walk away until you’re thirsty again,” he told me.